We primarily used GoAnywhere MFT to transfer files. Our organization had third-party source vendors who needed to submit files that had to get to us or our third-party end vendors securely. Files were fairly large in size, and we needed to track who was delivering the files and when, whether it was the right type of file, and whether it was delivered to the vendor partner at the right time.

We also wanted to run it through a project management tool. The automated processes, which I think were called project workflows, allowed us to do this a lot more seamlessly than we were able to do before.

I am very happy with the usage that we had when I was managing it. I am a fan of the product. It helped save me a lot of time and a lot of headaches.

It took us a little bit of time to get it up and running. It was not a whole lot of time compared to other tools. We had it up and running in no time, and we were able to implement an advanced solution. We had SecureMail working for years and had people logging in. It took us about a week to figure things out and get support from GoAnywhere on how to use that. It took about a month to two months to solidify the MVP use case, get that tested with the end users, and then get it up and running. We were also able to tweak it. After about six months of that tool being in use, we got feedback from our end vendors who were using the tool on both sides of the house. They were able to change the way the teams worked because they did not need to train everyone on how to use the tool. With this drag-and-drop interface that we had set up for them using GoAnywhere's MFT, each process was given a folder, so they just dragged files into the folder, and then from there, the backend handled all of it and moved it over to where it was supposed to go securely. They were able to change the way their teams worked internally. That was a benefit for us. Having efficiency for our partners is not something that necessarily saved us money, but it certainly created a much better working relationship with our partners. They were much happier with that.

The other benefit was time savings because of the simplicity of the tool. Now we have people logging into a complex interface, going in, checking a bunch of dots or a bunch of fields, and filling in some values as they upload each file. With the automation that we had with the process workflows, that was all handled in the backend. We have now got a little bit longer lead time and that is why we are looking at going back and getting this GoAnywhere MFT again because it saved us so much headache.

GoAnywhere MFT saved us time in connecting securely with the third parties we needed to collaborate with. Some of the files that we send are time-sensitive and restricted. We cannot share them with anyone who does not have an NDA with us. It was very important that these files were sent securely and quickly from our source vendors to us so that we could review them and send them over to our end vendors to be delivered to our stores. Having GoAnywhere MFT allowed us to change the way that we did our work.

I was looking into the Box, Salesforce, and SharePoint connectors, but we found that, although the price point was not bad, it was just a lot more than what we needed. We could do most of the capabilities that we wanted with the default API through Box or SharePoint. There was a lot of capability, but we thought that if we were going to use these, we better be doing a whole lot more with it than just the basic simple use case that we had. We were not going to use all the capabilities, so we decided to not use that. We did wind up needing some of the reporting capabilities that GoAnywhere has out of the box. Its advanced reporting made our IT department feel a lot more comfortable about the usage of a tool that had a front-facing website.

When we first started using it, SecureMail, or the ability to securely send mail to end users, as a single file or as a package of files, was very helpful for sending large packets of files. We could not send that through traditional email. 

It also allowed us to know that the file would expire after a certain amount of time. We could limit the number of downloads. That stopped us from having to worry about whether it had been routed to everyone in the organization. It helped to ensure that it was sent to who it was supposed to be sent to and is no longer available. That was why we had selected GoAnywhere a long time ago, and then the ability to tie it in via APIs and do low-code implementations allowed us to supercharge that.

While I was happy with the training and support, more of it could be beneficial. We had some basic training and support. I talked with Fortra recently, and they said that they revamped and changed their training support. I have not used it since December. I got support in February and May of last year, and it was not bad. I was just not sure which questions to ask. Trying to learn this stuff on the fly as you are handed a project is always stressful.

I like that you can tweak the interface so much, but it would be nice to be able to tweak it some more. The ability to further tweak the interface would be advantageous, as our end users had some questions about modifications that we could not address. Other than that, GoAnywhere seemed to fulfill its role as a simple solution for secure file transfer.

My organization started using it in about 2012, but I started using it in 2017. Unfortunately, we stopped using it in December 2023. We had been looking at different products that we could remove from our product line. We have a lot of different tools that we use. 

GoAnywhere was selected as one of those that we would not use. However, I am currently looking at using GoAnywhere again because removing it has caused a lot of internal problems. We are currently looking at using GoAnywhere or similar tools.

I was very happy with their tech support. Whenever I called or emailed, they responded quickly. For emergencies, they made themselves available to assist promptly.

When we had issues, they moved forward quickly within a couple of days. When we had an emergency, they would make themselves available to handle that. When our service went down because we were transferring over, they were on board for a full five days. They were there and available. I was very impressed by their ability to provide tech support for something that was a very critical system for us.

They were one of our top vendor partners. I would rate them a nine out of ten. I was very impressed, and I expected more of my other vendors because of the quality of support that I got from Fortra.

Positive

They are not similar, but we tried using SharePoint and Adobe products to perform similar operations of sending files securely. However, these alternatives were complex and not user-friendly. They could do the basic operations of sending files and securely allowing us to share files with our vendors, but it just got complicated. There were too many widgets and too much going on, so we had to train our end users on what to do and how to do it right every single time.

Our users found it easier to use a dedicated tool like GoAnywhere, which had simpler and restricted access controls. With GoAnywhere, the users would log in, and they had files, and those were the only folders they had access to. The access was set by the administrator. It was very clear what they should be using that tool for. When it came to SharePoint, the users had restricted files for a specific purpose, but they also had a whole lot of other files for other reasons, so they would often get lost. It was nice to have a dedicated tool different from other tools that the users were using.

We deployed it three times. Prior to me, it was deployed on a Linux box. We redeployed it to another Linux box, and I was part of that, and then we redeployed it to an Azure machine. I wish that we had more resources and more technical support on our end.

The GoAnywhere team was fantastic in helping us. I am not a technical guy, but I was able to figure it out. The documentation was pretty clear, and for anything that I did not get, I could get on the phone with them. I was pretty happy with how you take the package and install the package and it just runs on your server. It was pretty straightforward. The hard part was working with our IT to make sure that we were doing everything securely on our end. You could have a lockbox, but if you have the key sitting outside, what good is that? Getting it set up so that it was a fully secure system from the moment users accessed it to the moment the users got the NAND file was critical. All the problems that we had or the challenges that we had were related to setting up the cloud machine and working with Azure to get it working, not so much with GoAnywhere's platform.

We were setting up a brand new virtual machine on the Azure environment, so we needed people who could handle the infrastructure as a service capability. That is a whole team at our company. We also had to make sure that the entire thing was set up securely. We have a whole security department that handles that and makes sure that we are setting ourselves up with the right WAF, that it is HTTPS, and that it has a security certificate. 

I managed to handle the installation of the software myself. I also set it up and got it configured. I did that myself with support from other people on my team to make sure that I was dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Getting someone else to look at what you are doing is always good quality control. For the most part, it was just me and one other person.

If anyone feels that the price for this product is too high, I would like to know what else they are using. When it comes to secure systems that we have used, the price point can get a whole lot higher. You might end up saving in the short term with other solutions, but are you getting a secure product? Do you feel confident in that? Will you be able to get any support afterward? From my experience, based on the price point and the service that we got, it was a good value for our money. Other people may have different requirements, but it met and exceeded the security requirements for our use case. I would recommend considering the product, what you are spending, and whether you are getting support for that.

We considered using their agents, but we found that a front-facing website was a lot easier for our users to use and for us to implement. We did not have extremely capable IT people to go and install the agents and make sure that we were installing the right version and keeping that up to date on our end users. Having our users guided over to a website that we could then maintain was a lot easier for us to manage. We are not talking about thousands of users. We are talking about about 60 users in total who we were connecting to the tool.

We looked into SecureForms for our end users. It was an additional data entry. For the most part, for our particular use case, these final ART files already had all the metadata that we needed inside of another tool. It was just about getting these files that were identified by a unique identifier from the artist over to our end users. Everything that we needed to know was contained within the user who was logging in and could be referenced by the unique identifier, so we did not want to busy the process with SecureForms. There might be other use cases where SecureForms could be helpful, and we have dabbled with it, but to get our particular use case out the door, we did not need SecureForms.

I would rate Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT a ten out of ten. I was very impressed by the tool, its capability, and the way their support responded. I would absolutely recommend it. I am an advocate for this product. I am biased because it saved me time and frustration.

I would definitely use the product again. I am advocating for it right now. We have spent considerably more than what we have spent in our entire infrastructure trying to find other solutions, but we have not found any. I would definitely go back to it.

We use it for data transfer with certain software vendors and partners. We also use it for back-and-forth customer data transfers for deposits. We also send data back to our customers for statements and reconciliation. We use it for system-to-system integration internally and we also use their secure upload feature for secure file sharing between teams and customers. We use it for just about every use case available.

It has been a couple of years since we started doing data transfer directly with our customers. We started with system integration, so we were just moving data back and forth between us and our software vendors. We stepped into the customer side of it in the last six years or so.

We use SecureForms for things like mortgage closings and secure document uploads from customers who have loans in progress. We also use it for internal operations for data handoffs between teams to securely send files. We do an encryption layer on top of that, so it works very well for us in sending data back and forth all over the company.

GoAnywhere MFT has saved us time in connecting securely with third parties for different resources. We can typically get set up with a new vendor after getting through security protocols in about two days. It works pretty well for us.

It probably saves us anywhere from four to eight hours a month in operations. We onboard new platforms once or twice a quarter. For customers, we upload the data to them versus them downloading from us. It is the same thing. We do five or six of those per month. It works out pretty well. It allows us to set things up, and if we have to make a tweak, it is quick. For example, if a customer makes a change, it is a matter of quick config change rather than us spending hours refactoring code to handle that. It works pretty well. We get four to eight hours per month of time savings as compared to other platforms.

The most valuable feature is customer data transfers for traditional SFTP. Some of our biggest customers are on the platform, and it works out very well for us as a big selling point. 

On the platform side, I would like to see some improvements in the dashboarding and telemetry data. We take a lot of that data today, and we end up writing some custom dashboards so that we can run the day to day operations. We are sending and receiving millions of dollars a day, and for us, the dashboards are a bit lacking. It works great if you have one job that needs to run successfully. However, depending on how you build it, there may be dependencies that fail, and you may need to do certain alerting to teams and things of that nature. What we are looking at right now is potentially rebuilding our dashboard a second time to improve it a little bit further based on the operations of the team. We would love to see some improvements there. That is one area where they could improve. Everything else is the best of the business from what I have seen.

We have been using MST for over ten years. 

Its stability is fine. I run architecture in addition to integration. We look at how critical applications are to our environment and our business. GoAnywhere MFT is in the top three most critical ones for us in terms of what has to run consistently and resiliency. We send and receive data all day long. GoAnywhere is, knock on wood, bulletproof for us. It works very well. In the last two years that I have run the platform, we have had one major outage, and that was something we did. It was not the platform's fault.

Its scalability has been very good. We have not run into a lot of issues with that. We just implemented clustering to preemptively get in front of that, but from a scale perspective, we never get complaints from our customers on the speed of upload or download. We consistently have 99.9% or 99.99% uptime. It works very well for us.

Their support is good. We have a good relationship with customer support, our account manager, and the consulting arm. We leverage all three. From the last several years, we know how to do the dance and navigate support challenges. Sometimes there are things that we spend consulting hours on. If it is a bigger problem and we have a production incident and the services would not turn back on, we know that we can count on Fortra to get back to us. Normally, it takes less than a couple of hours to fix an issue, so we lean on them pretty heavily for things of that nature, and then we meet with our consulting arm every week for improvement opportunities and long-range planning-type items.

I would rate them a nine out of ten. I would give them a ten if the resolution on the first call was better. That is the only improvement area right now. With as many customers as they have, that is probably not going to happen. They cannot justify it.

Positive

It was already in place when I got here. I have used IBM Sterling Integrator and Amazon AWS S3 in previous organizations.

IBM Sterling Integrator is closest to GoAnywhere MFT. It is a lot older. It does not have as modern architecture as GoAnywhere MFT, but it is close from an operational perspective. It basically works with everything, which is what you want in file transfer, but the management of IBM Sterling Integrator is difficult as compared to GoAnywhere MFT. With GoAnywhere MFT, once we have built a job five or six times, we can do it pretty fast. Things like clustering and high availability and the fact that it has got web components put it over the edge for us.

We are still one of their old-school on-prem clients. We like having control.

It was already in place when I got here. We went through an upgrade and a clustering implementation last week. The engagement was very good. It was a lot faster than a lot of the other vendors we have worked with in the past. I was expecting that it would take us three months, but we got the implementation done in about a month. We had all the servers and the other things ready which saved time, but for what we were looking at doing, I thought it would take three times longer, so it was good.

From the stories I have heard of onboarding or from the secondhand information based on my talking to some of the other engineers in the past, it took us about three months to get comfortable with the solution. We onboarded another team member to the solution this year. It took him about two months of being trained by our other engineers to get the hang of it. He has never worked on file transfer before, so there were some basics that we had to get out of the way in the first few weeks.

It requires pretty routine maintenance. We do things like security patches. We take all the updates that Fortra pushes out, and then there are the occasional security tweaks or things of that nature to the platform itself. A lot of that has to do with the way we deploy it. We are in a highly regulated environment, but not all Fortra customers have to deal with that. 

If I were to give a TCO number on the maintenance side, maintenance licenses are pretty competitive in the market. Our maintenance total is probably around 50,000. From an FTE perspective, managing that infrastructure requires probably half of an FTE, so our TCO for a given year is probably 100,000, which is not bad for a solution of its size and capabilities.

Its pricing is fair. It is not the most expensive, and it is not the cheapest. For what we get in our environment, the pricing model works pretty well.

With file transfer, if you were to move to an S3 pricing model where you are paying for the storage, for large organizations, that tends to be cost-prohibitive because technology is often viewed as a cost center. So, you do not have a way to offset those things unless you start charging fees. We charge a very small fee for file transfer services, but if we were to change to a platform that did pay-for-consumption instead of pay-per-seat licensing, we would have to rethink our file transfer ops for sure.

We reviewed other solutions on the market during renewals but found GoAnywhere to be the best fit for us.

From what I have seen, other teams that run file transfer platforms for other organizations of our size normally need at least one extra FTE to manage what we do. We do it with about an FTE and a half, whereas other teams need three or four engineers. They often need one person dedicated to running the system itself, let alone building out any automation. We have one guy who does all that.

Overall, based on the other players in the market, GoAnywhere MFT is a ten out of ten for us. They have the right blend. While there are always going to be improvement areas, especially for the price, it is a slam dunk. It is hard to say to go with another solution because it is very stable.

We are using it for all our file-transferring needs. We mostly use it for confidential files and larger files. We want to securely send the files that are on the confidential side. We feel it is very secure for sending a file over.

By implementing this solution, we wanted to have a centralized place for all our file-transferring needs because previously, there were too many ways. It was done by email. It was done through FTP. Everyone was trying to find their own solution. This way, we could centralize it and make sure that everyone is using the same tool.

We use it with Office 365. We have a single sign-on, and we have implemented it with every deployment of a laptop.

It works seamlessly. There are no issues. It has been excellent. It is so easy. It is very user-friendly. There are never any issues. There is a lot of flexibility with it, and we are staying compliant, so it is very important.

It streamlines everything and keeps things centralized. There is also automated scheduling.

For us, cybersecurity is very important, and GoAnywhere MFT keeps us very secure. That is a very good benefit. We have a centralized place for file transfers. People do not think of other options, such as using Dropbox or sending files by email or FTP.

GoAnywhere has saved us time in connecting securely with the third parties we need to collaborate securely with. It is hard to say how much time it has saved, but we do not need to discuss how we are going to send a file securely. We used to waste a lot of time previously.

It streamlines the files. Anyone can go pick up the file that we give access to. It is great.

For what we are using it for, it is doing the job, so I would not be able to say how to improve it. For us, it is perfect. It is a good solution that we are using, and we are going to continue to do so. However, it should be advertised more as a solution. I did not see it out there beforehand.

We have been using GoAnywhere MFT for the past six months. They gave us a free trial, and we liked it, so we made the purchase.

It is very stable. We have not had any issues.

It is scalable. 

We have 25 users using this solution. It is one company. We are just 25 people. It is a small company.

We did not require any support. It is very simple. We are only using the file transfer, so it is very simple.

We were not using anything before. That is why it is such a great solution for us.

We have the cloud solution, The cloud provider is AWS.

I was involved in its deployment, and there were no problems. In terms of the implementation strategy, we just had a team meeting about it. I informed everyone and then implemented the credentials.

It does not require any maintenance.

I did not need any external help.

The best benefit is time and security.

I find it to be very fair. It is very good.

We did not evaluate other options. I trust Fortra, and I use them for other solutions. That is why I went to them with a scenario, and they got back to us about using this system.

I would highly recommend this solution. I am a big believer that you get what you pay for.

We do not use GoAnywhere's Secure Forms. We are using this solution for simple file transfers. We are not getting too complex with it. We also do not make use of the GoAnywhere agents or the GoFast feature.

I would definitely rate Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT a ten out of ten.

The most common use case is secure file transfer. Fortra's web client provides that. SecureMail also helps them send emails with large file attachments.

We realized the benefits of GoAnywhere immediately. So many threats affect the most commonly used types of file transfers. One common way to transfer files is to put them on a flash drive, which is risky. Webmail also has limitations. You can only send around  25 MB through Outlook and Gmail. GoAnywhere is helpful and secure because it allows different protocols and encryption supported by the strongest, most secure encryption algorithms.

GoAnywhere saves time when connecting to third parties because it's easily configured. It saves more time than other kinds of file transfer applications. It's user friendly and easy to configure.

I like the versatility GoAnywhere provides, allowing transfers through HTTPS and different protocols. It can also transfer through a server and a client.

GoAnywhere's connectors are helpful for connecting and integrating various products, such as Google Cloud, AWS Cloud, Azure, and SharePoint. This makes it much easier for our clients to achieve their targets. The connectors are critical because production processes need them to connect between two applications. It helps to maintain a smooth connection between two products.

We use GoAnywhere's agents instead of the more commonly used Samba or network share. The agents are good for a company with branches globally or nationwide. It allows the branches to connect to the head offices.

The secure forms are helpful. One of my clients is in the HR department, so using secure forms to collect details from job applicants is easy. They can be compiled in a specific folder or directory so that HR can easily navigate and manage all the details of prospective employees applying to a certain company.

For some clients, we recommend GoFast for companies that need transparency between the first and second clients. If they both use GoAnywhere, we suggest GoFast since it will speed up the file transfers between them.

I tried to copy a file from an S3 bucket to another storage class. I don't know if it is a limitation from AWS, not the MFT. If I copy a file from the AWS S3 bucket to that storage class, it can't be transferred. It says that I can't remember the exact error, but it cannot be processed. I want MFT to be more compatible with cloud-based applications or services like AWS. 

I have used GoAnywhere for almost two years.

GoAnywhere MFT doesn't have any stability problems. Any crashes are related to the client's services or problems with their database. We sometimes encounter lags when there is so much data that the donor cannot trust.

GoAnywhere is easy to scale up. It isn't time-consuming to scale GoAnywhere MFT up.

I rate Fortra's support nine out of 10. I've reported bugs to Fortra support. The issues take time and can't be fixed with a press of a button. It would be helpful if Fortra's support would regularly update us since our partners and clients in the Philippines have problems that require expertise on the backend. There are some cases they cannot provide answers. 

Positive

Our clients have different platforms. We deploy in cloud, hybrid, or sometimes on-premise because other clients do not trust a hybrid or cloud environment. We haven't encountered difficulties with GoAnywhere itself. We've had much more problems on the client's side. 

We typically assign at least two resources for the deployment so we have a backup. Implementing GoAnywhere itself takes half a day, but setting up the client's environment requires an entire day. The only maintenance after deployment is upgrading the solution and migrating it from one environment to another.

Even if you think the price is high, I would recommend GoAnywhere because it is secure and easy to use and configure. It supports different kinds of protocols. It resolves the limitations of common types of file transfers. 

I rate Fortra GoAnywhere MFT 10 out of 10.